Sales representatives for information management software products can face various challenges while trying to persuade a potential customer to purchase new products, such as upgrade from a competitor's existing information management product. Information management products provide information management services for information management systems. Information management systems organize and backup information, i.e., “production data”, generated during the operation of client computing systems. Information management systems enable organizations to comply with data storage regulations and other business needs by providing retrievable copies, i.e., non-production or “secondary copies” of the production data for each client computing system. Because information management systems can play an important role within an organization, a sales representative may have various hurdles to overcome in order to successfully persuade a potential customer to switch to a different, and even better, information management product.
An example of a challenge that a sales representative for a information management product faces is that gathering information about the customer's existing information management system can be inconvenient and time consuming for the customer. Historically, sales representatives send a questionnaire to the customer. The questionnaires include questions like: how many client or server computing devices does the customer back up, what is the capacity of the storage devices for the client or server computing devices, what is the capacity of the storage devices used for storing the secondary copies, with what frequency does the customer create secondary copies. Having to obtain this information for a large computing system to the sales representative can be an big disincentive for a busy customer, even if the customer is unhappy with its existing information management solutions.
Another example of a challenge that the sales representative may have relates to customer concerns about how a replacement information management system would look and work with the customer's computing devices. Changing from a known system to an unknown system can be as scary or unnerving as transitioning from, for example, using an Apple operating system to using a Microsoft operating system. In other words, although the replacement information management system may perform similar (or better) functions as the existing product, fear of losing data or fear of operator error may cause a potential customer to hesitate or be reluctant to pursue an information management system upgrade.
Another example of a challenge that a the sales representative may have to overcome relates to customer concerns about overall cost of the upgrade. With any large and important purchase, various hidden costs arise. However, not knowing what hidden costs may be lurking behind a commitment may be an additional disincentive for a customer to pursue a new or replacement information management product.
The need exists for systems and methods that overcome the above problems, as well as systems and methods that provide additional benefits. Overall, the examples herein of some prior or related systems and methods and their associated limitations are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of existing or prior systems and methods will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon reading the following Detailed Description.